In 1907, Charles Peirce attempted to write an article that would introduce his distinct variety of pragmatism to a general audience. He eventually produced more than five hundred handwritten sheets, culminating in five major variants. Peirce left the second unfinished, while extensive portions of the third through fifth have appeared in collections of his writings, including the beginning that is common to all five. This is the completed and signed first version, which has never been published before and offers fresh (...) insights into the evolution of its author’s thinking about semeiotic and pragmatism. (shrink)

What happens when an entire group of human beings is excluded from the definition of humanity? How is the power of language used to distort reality? What happens when a comprehensive economic plan is based on theft, brainwashing, slave labor, and murder? These and other philosophical questions about the Holocaust are contemplated in Contemporary Portraits of Auschwitz. In 1988, a group of philosophers who had survived the Holocaust, or had known people at the Auschwitz death camp, decided to found an (...) organization that would examine the philosophical implications of Shoah: the Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust. Noting that the history and the personal horror stories had been told and retold, SPSGH's founders Sander Lee, Berel Lang, and Alan Rosenberg argued that too little study had been so far devoted to the philosophy of Hitler's final solution and other genocides. Auschwitz problematized the Enlightenment concept of humanity, and other concepts. The perfection of state-sponsored and -administered mass death issued in new forms of language, moral indifference, and forgetting. Philosophy often even fails to mention the Holocaust in discussions of National Socialism. And the disaster of Auschwitz has been largely neutralized by the normalization of a "ruined" language. This volume includes essays in several areas: Witnesses and Testimonies; Morality and Ethics; Art and Poetry; History and Memory; and The Crisis of Representation. Contributors are Karyn Ball, Eve Bannet, Debra Bergoffen, James Bernauer, Klaus Dorner, Jennifer N. Fink, Roger Fjellstrom, Ruth Liberman, Burkhard Liebsch, Alan Milchman, Raj Sampath, Paul Sars, Hans Seigfried, Thomas W. Simon, Dan Stone, Peter Strasser, Frans van Peperstratten, Erik M. Vogt, Andrew Weinstein, and others. (shrink)

The semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce is irreducibly triadic, positing that a sign mediates between the object that determines it and the interpretant that it determines. He eventually holds that each sign has two objects and three interpretants, standardizing quickly on immediate and dynamical for the objects but experimenting with a variety of names for the interpretants. The two most prominent terminologies are immediate/dynamical/final and emotional/energetic/logical, and scholars have long debated how they are related to each other. This paper (...) seeks to shed new light on the matter by reviewing the numerous manuscript drafts where Peirce develops the latter nomenclature while attempting to introduce his pragmatism to a general audience. It then goes on to examine an additional set of interpretants, intentional/effectual/communicational, and shows that the three different trichotomies can be understood as complementary, rather than redundant or conflicting. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce is best known as the founder of pragmatism, but the name that he preferred for his overall system of thought was ‘‘synechism’’ because the principle of continuity was its central thesis. He considered time to be the paradigmatic example and often wrote about its various aspects while discussing other topics. This essay draws from many of those widely scattered texts to formulate a distinctively Peircean philosophy of time, incorporating extensive quotations into a comprehensive and coherent synthesis. (...) Time is not an existential subject with past, present, and future as its incompatible predicates, but rather a real law enabling things to possess contrary qualities at its different determinations, and Peirce identifies four classes of such states based on when and how they are realized. Because time is continuous, it is not composed of instants, and even the present is an indefinite lapse during which we are directly aware of constant change. The accomplished past is perpetually growing as the possibilities and conditional necessities of the future are actualized at the present, and the entire universe evolves from being utterly indeterminate toward being absolutely determinate. Nevertheless, time must return into itself even if events are limited to only a portion of it, a paradox that is resolved with the aid of projective geometry. Temporal synechism thus touches on a broad spectrum of philosophical issues including mathematics, phenomenology, logic, and metaphysics. (shrink)

Modern approaches to engineering ethics typically involve the systematic application of universal abstract principles, reflecting the culturally dominant paradigm of technical rationality (techne). By contrast, virtue ethics recognizes that sensitivity to context and practical judgment (phronesis) are indispensable in particular concrete situations, and therefore focuses on the person who acts, rather than the action itself. Virtues are identified within a specific social practice in accordance with its proper purpose, its societal role and associated responsibilities, and the internal goods that are (...) unique to it. As a result, ethics is recognized as something integral to engineering, rather than supplemental to it. This is necessary and appropriate, since engineers are often the decision-makers in contexts where the potential beneficiaries and harm-bearers are not the same; even their routine technical choices have ethical ramifications. The reasoning process commonly employed by engineers is similar in structure to that of scientists as articulated by Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of philosophical pragmatism. As a "logic of ingenuity," it requires retroductively creating a diagrammatic model of a problem and its proposed solution, and then deductively working out the consequences, such that this serves as an adequate substitute for inductively evaluating the actual situation, which does not yet exist. As with ethical deliberation more generally, the key to success is having the ability to discern the significant aspects of reality and consistently capture them, before definitively selecting a way forward from among multiple viable options. This requires a carefully cultivated habit of imagining possibilities, assessing alternatives, and selecting one of them to bring about. (shrink)

The idea that moral virtues form some sort of “unity” has received considerable attention from virtue theorists. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of unity among intellectual virtues has been wrongly overlooked. My approach has two main components. First, I work to distinguish the variety of different views that are available under the description of a unity thesis. I suggest that these views can be categorised depending on whether they are versions of standard unity or of strong unity. (...) Standard unity claims that the possession of one virtue implies possession of all the others. Strong unity claims that the virtues are, in some sense, all the same thing. By exploring what these different versions of unity would look like when applied to intellectual virtues, I aim to provide a menu of options for future work in virtue epistemology. I then develop and defend one of these options in more detail, arguing that the initially less plausible strong unity has merit when applied to the intellectual sphere. In these two ways, I aim to show that the possibility of unity among the intellectual virtues is deserving of serious consideration. (shrink)

A centipede can walk until it thinks about howit does so. Thereafter it stumbles, over thesheer impossibility of the information andcoordination required. Life in the economy islittle different. Those engaged in productionand exchange discover, pragmatically, ways tomake them work. Those observing the processsee, realistically, the immense improbabilitythat it should do so. That most economies workin practice, but must pass such toughteleological tests to succeed in theory,highlights a difference between players' andspectators' outlook which may help to explainwhy the game has repeatedly (...) been thrown wideopen just when conclusive results seemed withinreach.Section 1 of this paper identifies the fourforms of realism which economists have tendedto adopt. Section 2 considers the pragmatism ofeconomic agents, when observed in action bypsychologists and management scholars notoverly steeped in economic theory. Theconcluding section reviews the ways in whicheconomists have tried to blur the distinction,by reclassifying agents as realistic or theirown views as pragmatic, and suggests that amore pragmatic economics might bridge thedivide. (shrink)

The first book length study of property-owning democracy, Republic of Equals argues that a society in which capital is universally accessible to all citizens is uniquely placed to meet the demands of justice. Arguing from a basis in liberal-republican principles, this expanded conception of the economic structure of society contextualizes the market to make its transactions fair. The author shows that a property-owning democracy structures economic incentives such that the domination of one agent by another in the market is structurally (...) impossible. The result is a renovated form of capitalism in which the free market is no longer a threat to social democratic values, but is potentially convergent with them. It is argued that a property-owning democracy has advantages that give it priority over rival forms of social organization such as welfare state capitalism and market socialist institutions. The book also addresses the currently high levels of inequality in the societies of the developed West to suggest a range of policies that target the "New Inequality" of our times. For this reason, the work engages not only with political philosophers such as John Rawls, Philip Pettit and John Tomasi, but also with the work of economists and historians such as Anthony B. Atkinson, François Bourguignon, Jacob S. Hacker, Lane Kenworthy, and Thomas Piketty. (shrink)

Introduction: Natural necessity, being, and becoming -- Accentuate the negative -- Diffracting dialectic -- Opening totality -- Constellating ethics -- Metacritique I : philosophy's primordial failing -- Metacritique II : dialectic and difference -- Conclusion: Natural necessity and the grounds of justice : natural necessity as material meshwork.

Despite immediate appearances, this book is not primarily a hermeneutical exercise in which the superiority of one interpretation of canonical texts is championed against others. Its origin lies elsewhere, near the overlap of history, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and social theory of the usual kind. Weber, Pareto, Freud, W. I. Thomas, Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, and many others of similar stature long ago wondered and wrote much about the interplay between societal rationalization and individual rationality, between collective furor and private psychopathology—in short, (...) about the strange and worrisome union of “character and social structure” (to recall Gerth and Mills). Pondering the history of social thought in this century can lead to the unpleasant realization that such large-scale questions slipped away, especially from sociologists, sometime before World War II. Or, if not entirely lost, they were so transformed in range and rhetoric that a gap opened between contemporary theorizing and its European background. Perhaps this partly explains Weber’s continuing appeal. By dealing with him, one might again broach topics long at odds with “social science” of the last forty years.—From the Preface. (shrink)

What is logical relevance? Anderson and Belnap say that the “modern classical tradition [,] stemming from Frege and Whitehead-Russell, gave no consideration whatsoever to the classical notion of relevance.” But just what is this classical notion? I argue that the relevance tradition is implicitly most deeply concerned with the containment of truth-grounds, less deeply with the containment of classes, and least of all with variable sharing in the Anderson–Belnap manner. Thus modern classical logicians such as Peirce, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and (...) Quine are implicit relevantists on the deepest level. In showing this, I reunite two fields of logic which, strangely from the traditional point of view, have become basically separated from each other: relevance logic and diagram logic. I argue that there are two main concepts of relevance, intensional and extensional. The first is that of the relevantists, who overlook the presence of the second in modern classical logic. The second is the concept of truth-ground containment as following from in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. I show that this second concept belongs to the diagram tradition of showing that the premisses contain the conclusion by the fact that the conclusion is diagrammed in the very act of diagramming the premisses. I argue that the extensional concept is primary, with at least five usable modern classical filters or constraints and indefinitely many secondary intensional filters or constraints. For the extensional concept is the genus of deductive relevance, and the filters define species. Also following the Tractatus, deductive relevance, or full truth-ground containment, is the limit of inductive relevance, or partial truth-ground containment. Purely extensional inductive or partial relevance has its filters or species too. Thus extensional relevance is more properly a universal concept of relevance or summum genus with modern classical deductive logic, relevantist deductive logic, and inductive logic as its three main domains. (shrink)

Attending to the Literary: The Distinctiveness of Literature is a foray into current debates about the nature of the literary. What is literary? Is literarity a thing? Are there still aesthetic standards of taste? Is the category of literary aesthetics an obstacle to understanding the uses of literature? What does it mean to count the reading of literature as an experience in its own right? What would be the deficits to human experience without literature? Attending to the Literary addresses all (...) of these questions with a view to challenging the notion of literarity as merely representative of experience. On the contrary, Alan Singer shows how literarity is an enacting of experience. Through close readings of an eclectic repertoire of literary sentences-culled from the genres of fiction, poetry and drama--Singer demonstrates how syntax stages human capacities for attending ever more consequentially to the world of practical experience. These stagings of forms of attention involve readers in the drama of reason giving and expand the possibilities of rational imagination. Attending to the Literary speaks to a broad audience of readers for whom the question "Why literature matters?" remains an urgent intellectual challenge. (shrink)

I argue that the most promising approach to understanding J.J. Gibson's "affordances" takes affordances themselves as ontological primitives, instead of treating them as dispositional properties of more primitive things, events, surfaces, or substances. These latter are best treated as coalescences of affordances present in the environment (or "coalescences of use-potential," as in Sanders (1994) and Hilditch (1995)). On this view, even the ecological approach's stress on the complementary organism/environment pair is seen as expressing a particular affordance relation between the (...) world and the analyst. That the world is parsed in any way among events and objects, perceivers and worlds, etc., reflects equally features of certain real or possible perspectives on the world and features of the world itself. In section 1, I begin by contending that, contrary to the apparent expectations of some in the field, the bare existence of affordances is surely quite uncontroversial. In section 2, I argue that the most reasonable approach to foundational ontology is a relativistic one. In section 3, I address the claim that affordances must be ontologically complemented by effectivities for the sake of completeness, and I shall argue against that claim on grounds that I take to reflect some of Gibson's most important insights. This work will help to clarify the way affordances are to be used in the fourth and final section, where I argue that ontological work, even within special sciences, should not be merely "regional," and that the most attractive general approach to ontological questions is one that is based on affordances, rather than upon things, events, surfaces, and the like. (shrink)

Abstract:McMahan, Nussbaum, and Johannsen have recently suggested that humans should seek to eliminate predators from the wild or avoid reintroducing them if this can be done without great harm to an ecosystem. This is because predators cause a great deal of pain to those sentient animals which are their prey. This paper will first challenge the pragmatic aspects of such a position on the global level, arguing that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to remove predators from the (...) environment without doing great ecological harm. Because removal of predators might be considered more feasible on the micro scale this paper will go on to challenge the axiological foundations of such a view. In particular defenders of the removal of predators from the environment tend to base their position on the preferencing of the disvalue of pain over the value of life. Yet if life itself has value it can be a good even with those beings that cause pain to others. Moreover, there is a value to diverse forms of life that must also be acknowledged. An ecosystem with diverse habits and life forms exercising different ways of being has great value even if again this comes at the cost of suffering and pain to some of the creatures in it. Once these things are understood it is clear that predators should not be eliminated from the wild and indeed should be reintroduced into ecosystems where they once flourished. (shrink)

We introduce a notion of complexity for interpretations, which is used to prove some new results about interpretations of sequential theories. In particular, we give a new, elementary proof of Pudlák's theorem that sequential theories are connected. We also demonstrate a counterexample to the infinitary distributive law $a \vee \bigwedge_{i \in I} b_i = \bigwedge_{i \in I} (a \vee b_i)$ in the lattice of chapters, in which the chapters a and b i are compact. (Counterexamples in which a is not (...) compact have been found previously.). (shrink)

Consider this propositional function which includes the dyadic predicate “loves”: “X does not love Y unless Y loves X” (or “if Y does not love X”). This function may be treated in four ways. (1) If universally quantified, it states a (purported) conceptual truth about “love” or the nature or essence of love. Love is necessarily reciprocal. (2) If universally quantified, it may alternatively be a nomological generalization stating an empirical or factual truth about human nature, i.e., about a pattern (...) of reciprocity that occurs among people who are independently identified as lovers. (3) If instantiated with constants, it is an empirical proposition about the attitudes or behaviors of particular individuals (a, b, c). Finally, (4) the function may be treated axiologically; it expresses a normative judgment about what love ought to be or what lovers ought to feel or do. Other propositional functions may be constructed for the constancy, exclusivity, and benevolence of love. This essay investigates the implications of these understandings of the function and how they are logically related to each other. (shrink)

Individuals are faced with the many opportunities to pirate. The decision to pirate or not may be related to an individual''s attitudes toward other ethical issues. A person''s ethical and moral predispositions and the judgments that they use to make decisions may be consistent across various ethical dilemmas and may indicate their likelihood to pirate software. This paper investigates the relationship between religion and a theoretical ethical decision making process that an individual uses when evaluating ethical or unethical situations. An (...) ethical decision making model was studied for general unethical scenarios and for the unethical behavior of software piracy. The research model was tested via path analysis using structural equation modeling and was found to be appropriate for the sample data. The results suggest that there is a relationship between religion and the stages of an ethical decision making process regarding general ethical situations and software piracy. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

This paper describes a new course in Medical Technology and Critical Decisions, part of the Technology Studies Program at Wellesley College, established with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's New Liberal Arts Program. The course uses the dramatic new options in medicine presented by technology to individuals and society as a vehicle for promoting general technological literacy in liberal arts students. The course motivates the study of the scientific principles on which the technology rests and the mathematical principles (...) of a methodology for making rational choices. A case in point is the decision of a pregnant woman whether or not to undergo amniocentesis, a procedure used to determine the genetic make-up of a fetus from cells in the amniotic fluid. The course introduces students to the underlying notions of genetics; the physical principles behind the ultrasound imaging technique used to position the needle that draws the fluid; the probability and statistics needed to understand the risks to the woman and fetus both of having and of not having the procedure; and the methodology of decision analysis, increasingly used by genetic counselors to help prospective parents incorporate their personal values into the decision-making process. (shrink)

This collection joins together sixty essays on the philosophy of love and sex. Each was presented at a meeting of The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love held between 1977 and 1992 and later revised for this edition. Topics addressed include ethical and political issues (AIDS, abortion, homosexual rights, and pornography), conceptual matters (the nature, essence, or definition of love, friendship, sexual desire, and perversion); the study of classical and historical figures (Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and Kierkegaard); and (...) issues in feminist theory (sexual objectification, the social construction of female sexuality, reproductive and marital arrangements). Authors include Jerome Shaffer, Sandra Harding, Michael Ruse, Richard Mohr, Russell Vannoy, Claudia Card, M.C. Dillon, Gene Fendt, Steven Emmanuel, T.F. Morris, Timo Airaksinen, and Sylvia Walsh. The editor, who is the author of Pornography (1986), The Structure of Love (1990), and Sexual Investigations (1996), has also contributed six pieces and an Introduction. (shrink)

oes anything exist outside culture? Is there anything that we do that is free of the distortions of our tastes and customs? That isn't irrevocably shaped by the languages we speak or our material interests? Is there anything out there that we can assume to be noncultural or transcultural or even universal?

Looks at the life and historical role of Louis Auguste Blanqui. Studies his philosophy, economic theories, and socialism.

In this Response to Hasko von Kriegstein, I defend several claims, including that the publicly-traded corporation and its assets are unowned; that managers may stand in fiduciary relations to shareholders that do not require managers to maximize shareholder wealth; and that the rights of a shareholder and of the owner of a privately-held corporation may differ fundamentally.

In Herodas Mime 6 Metro first learns from Coritto that she purchased her scarlet dildos from Kerdon the cobbler. In Mime 7 Metro comes to Kerdon’s cobbler’s shop and he shows her some special shoes, which the poet displays in a catalogue. Most scholars agree that the shoes in Mime 7 refer to the dildos in Mime 6, yet more work remains to unlock their hidden meaning. I argue that the catalogue of shoes in Mime 7 stands as a catalogue (...) of double entendres and that it is set among a series of sexual puns. (shrink)

Envy and Jealousy in Classical Athens examines the sensation, expression, and literary representation of envy and jealousy in Classical Athens.

In recent years, major disasters have figured prominently in the media. While corporate response to disasters may have raised corporate philanthropy to a new level, it remains an understudied phenomenon. This article draws on comparative research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate philanthropy to explore the geography of corporate philanthropic disaster response. The study analyzes donation announcements made by Fortune Global 500 firms from North America, Europe and Asia to look for regional patterns across three recent disasters: the South (...) Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the Kashmiri earthquake. The results reveal inter-regional differences in the overall likelihood of donations and in their cash value, in addition to the identification of home-region- and local presence effects. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed. (shrink)